Why shouldn't we be excited about it? Babers probably checks more boxes then any of the serious candidates we were looking at. If we can't gush over Babers, i'm not sure who we could gush over? As for recruiting against FSU, and Clemson, I don't think it really would have mattered who we brought in, we weren't going to out-recruit, or win many straight up battles with either anytime soon. Finally, in regards to defense, well you can't have it all. If you're running the amount of plays offensively that a Babers system usually runs, then you're going to be playing just that many more on defense. It makes perfect sense why his defenses would give up more numbers. A better indicator would be to look at his defenses yard per play, which are pretty good.
Will Babers be an ultimate success? Who knows, but imo we got ourselves the best HC possible to give us a very good chance to be a winner.